If you said “complain to the management” or “report the place to the department of sanitation”, you’d be wrong. Well, at least according to one waitress at a restaurant in Chengdu, China who told a customer that it was “normal” for creepy-crawlies to make it into restaurant food, and promptly swallowed the cockroach he had found to prove her point…

Businessman Zhang Yen was dining with his friend at the Shichuan Province restaurant earlier this week when he spotted a cockroach in his food. He immediately called the waitress over and showed it to her, demanding to know how she could serve up food containing bugs.

Rather than apologising and whisking the plate away, however, the waitress flew into a rage, telling Zhang, “No matter which restaurant you go to, you’ll find things like cockroaches in the food. It’s normal!”

Unable to contain his anger and amazed at her barefaced insolence, Zhang told the waitress to eat the cockroach herself if it was the everyday ingredient she claimed it to be.

Which is exactly what she did.

▼ Yoink

▼ Munch

▼ “I’ve eaten it, haven’t I!?”

Speechless, Zhang threw up his hands and agreed to pay for his food. The waitress, it seemed, had won this round, and seemed satisfied with herself for having proved the customer wrong.

According to reports, the owner of the restaurant later apologised to the disgruntled diner and assured him that she would reprimand the cockroach-munching waitress and that she, at least, did not consider cockroaches to be part of the menu. Unfortunately for her, though, footage of the incident had already made it onto the internet and had been picked up by numerous news agencies.